Connery (Part 14)

A Speculative Novel

I was in the air when the attack on the World Trade Centre occurred. It would change everyone’s lives, but for me it marked a very significant end of one chapter and the beginning of another. In 2001, I was 29 years old. I had been in the army and then kicked around the lower to middle echelons of the Secret Service. I made money on the property market. So much in fact that I had bought a small apartment which I meant to keep while using my profits from the sales I had made to buy another place with the intention to continue flipping but without the inconvenience of having to actually move out each time. This would be a good move because my period of air-bound wandering was about to come to an end and my life was about to gain more focus, albeit I would never properly settle down. I had killed six or seven people by now and if you were being pedantic you could say I was a mass murderer but inside I didn’t feel that I really qualified. I hadn’t been thinking about it for large swathes of time and I had been concentrating on other things. Money was a helpful distraction or more accurately the acquisition of it. A febrile excitement accompanied every log on to my bank account and I would hold off for weeks at a time so that the jump in the figures would be pleasingly significant. I would blow my cheeks up and stretch my arms above my head in a silent cheer. It gave me a sense of power. I would be able to do what I wanted, and I was seriously considering resigning from the service. To begin with I could concentrate more on playing the property game which was proving ludicrously profitable and surprisingly fun. I was also not stupid enough to think that my luck would continue in the long run. Sooner or later a seam was going to rip, a dog was going to bark, a policeman with a rubber glove was going to hold something aloft and say, ‘And you’re sure no one else had access to your bag?’ But the Twin Towers terrorist attack solved all my problems in one fell swoop. After I got back from the airport – people were standing around the lounges staring at the television screens showing the news unwind – I delivered the pouch and was called straight into GCHQ. There we assembled in a conference room and we received a breathless briefing by an ashen-faced woman with a large and inappropriate broach of a peacock above her left boob. She kept getting teary-eyed at the loss of life but couldn’t help but occasionally do a joke and grin as she realized how much work was going to be thrown our way. Plus, the leavening everything with informal self-deprecating humour was the house style of these types of presentations. As inevitable as slides and flow diagrams. I went home and slept with the television on.

The next day was supposed to be a day off but Ollie phoned me and told me to meet me on Hampstead Heath. It was mild, late Summer weather with dew glittering on the grass and a high London sky that was fringed with purple on the horizons and from somewhere Ollie had acquired a greyhound, which licked the hand that he then picked his nose with.

‘WH Auden was a great believer in picking his nose and eating it,’ he said as he considered his fingertip, then flicked it away. ‘Great defiers of convention, poets, eh? No moral middle ground for those chaps. Bunch of buggers as well. Auden was at least. You’re going to be staying put for a few weeks, Sammy. That okay with you?’

‘Anything you say, Ollie,’ I said. ‘Aim to please.’

He laughed at that and picked up the yellow tennis ball he’d brought with him, slung it high in the air and ambled off towards where the dog was already arrowing. I kept pace easily enough. The air was exactly the right temperature. The noise of the city was a pleasantly distant mumble.  

‘You recall that Kirkby business of yours a few years back?’ Ollie asked. ‘Well, it turns out that report of yours turned up in some inter-agency communique and it has received something of a reputation. Keen sighted, was one assessment. Prescient, another. Looks like the mob that did for Kirkby might well have been related to these mad Mullahs who’ve just declared war on freedom and the American way of life. You are in a very good position. Apparently, the Prime Minister has read it and he handed it over to the White House and the President has read it.’

‘Right,’ I said. I was trying to remember what I wrote, and indeed, if I had a copy of it somewhere so I could refresh my memory. ‘Seems an aeon ago now.’

‘I’m sure it does,’ Ollie said. He made an audible ‘oof’ as he bent once more to get the ball from the slavering jaws of his greyhound. ‘Let go Buckley! Good dog. Point being this kind of serendipity does not come around very often and does not necessarily last very long, so you might want to sit down, put on the old thinking cap and have a very good think about where you see yourself going in the next few years.’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you like the Jews?’

‘They’re okay, I suppose.’

‘Good man,’ Ollie said. ‘That’s worth bearing in mind. And you wish to continue in her Majesty’s Secret Service.’

‘I think I do,’ I said.

‘Good, excellent,’ Ollie said. ‘Our stars are hitched, Sammy old boy. And that means if you go up so do I. It also means if I go down, so do you. So, as you move in ever more interesting circles, I would be very appreciative of a certain discretion. Past misdeeds, shady compromises etc. I know it goes without saying, but like many things that go without saying, it has always been in my opinion best to say them. If you catch my drift?’

‘Yes.’

Ollie nodded and for a while we walked on with the occasional ball throw and back again, Buckley soaked in dew.

‘Have you met my father?’ Ollie said.

‘No.’

‘About time you did. I tell you what. I’ll get you one last trip, make it all official and you can go and see him. Take a few days leave as well. You ever been to Venice?’

‘No. I don’t … think so.’ I had been to so many cities, but Italy had been confined to Rome and Milan, and Naples. And Turin. But not Venice. And Florence.

‘The old coot lives out there, semi-permanent, like a posh Torremolinos,’ Ollie laughed. ‘But he has his fingers in many pies and is very high up in the service, so his friendship is not to be winked at. Far from it. He wishes to meet you and I don’t think I would be overstating it to say that it might be one of the more significant encounters in your life. That is if you wish to rise in the Service. That is: if you wish to get on.’

Landing in Venice was interesting. We came in across the lagoon with the city on our right, ever lower across the water until at the last minute the runway appeared just below the aircraft’s wheels and, with a bump and a skid, the airbrakes engaged and the contingent of homeward bound Italians burst into applause. I was booked into the Danieli; one of the finest hotels, a Ruskin stone’s throw from the Bridge of Sighs and the Palazzo Ducale. I got a bumpy water taxi directly there though it was pricey. The sun was hot, and I sat back and watched the city glide by as we bounced in the water nauseatingly in the wake of a huge cruise ship looming before us, with pointillist crowd of holidaymakers on the rail filming their own progress past the city.

I passed through the revolving doors of the hotel into another world of class and refinement, greeted by the concierge, my bag taken, shown to my room:

‘Woody Allen had this room last week,’ the neat porter in the bifocals confidentially informed me.

In my room, a blue fringed card awaited me, with written on it:

We request the pleasure of your company at Ca’ Bembo, Dorsoduro 9 pm

T.A.A.

Tom Aloysius Arrow was born on the 13th October 1929, which meant he was approaching his 72nd birthday. His family were stinking rich from land, originally, and then buttons once the industrial revolution came along. Educated at Rugby and then Oxford, joined the Army and from there the Special Operations Executive or the SOE. Was in at the very beginning, July 1940, rose quickly, gained a reputation as a daring and original thinker who didn’t lack for courage when it came to field operations. Parachuted into occupied France three times; Italy twice. Decorated on a number of occasions; some injuries. He had a wooden finger. Index finger: left hand. According to legend some villain pulled a gun on him and he’d stuck his finger in the barrel. Chap fired, blew his finger off and the gun up while Arrow was using the interim to stab him in the throat with a sharped tent peg. Commended for his work in Yugoslavia. Post-war MI6 career included field postings to Sarajevo and Berlin. A lot of time returning to Italy where he had bought properties. Married Blossom Alleyn in 1967. Five children – Ollie the third and the only to follow his father into the trade. Took an anonymous sounding administrative post in 1990 and retired from active service in 1998, although he still maintains a security clearance as part of a consultancy body which meets three times a year and is officially regarded as little more than a club for the old to relive their former glories but is rumoured to exert perhaps much unofficial influence.

I had done my research. What did Captain Plimsol say? Something about knowing what was on the other side of the hill. Or was it the Duke of Wellington? I knew already that this wasn’t some pleasure visit to be taken casually. Ollie had already warned me, in his own melodramatic way, about how important this meeting was, hence the research. I already knew that Ollie’s father must be something. Ollie projected an air of familial entitlement. MI6 was a family firm and his wasn’t the only dynasty to be formed in the corridors, as much as the official documents banged on about diversity and representation. There would be some of that as well. In fact, that’s what I was. They liked that I came from a relatively humble background, northern as well, which in the eyes of the upper reaches counted as an ethnicity. And from the army. I was the meritocracy made flesh. Patriotism and warlike grit. All of that. Stick me in among the sons of fathers. Add some competent bossy women who voluntarily disavowed feminism; and the British Secret Service was made. It hadn’t changed that much at all. I also knew that T.A.A. was retired only in name. So, I approached the evening like an interview. Because that’s exactly what it was. A try out.

Ca’ Bembo is an ordinary Venetian palazzo. It stands overlooking a narrow canal, a music school opposite and a language school to the side. I was greeted at the door by a servant in a light green cardigan, who took my coat and showed me up a steep staircase to the Piano Nobile. Chandeliers cast a golden light which was reflected in the stained glass of the magnificent four-hundred-year-old mirrors which occupied most of the walls. Cherubs frolicked from the ceilings and red curtains hung, moving before the open windows which let in the sound of a string quartet practicing Schubert from the music school opposite. There was a decent crowd of about ten well-dressed guests and two teenaged girls in knee length black skirts and white blouses passing through serving drinks from a tray. Mr. Arrow came through his guests with his hand outstretched and inclined slightly towards the floor, as if offering the option of kissing it. His silver hair was slicked back in thick lines; his eyes were large and watery, giving him a sentimental air. He had an extraordinarily large nose. He wore a dark purple suit. He was small.

‘Charmed,’ he said in a voice at once too loud and too high. ‘A complete and absolute pleasure. Please everybody, a young friend of my son Oliver, Samuel Coleridge. No really. That’s his name. Please, we were just about to go into dinner. Of course, yes. Come, come, come. Come one; come all.’

Everyone was ushered before us and we followed with Arrow holding my elbow and guiding me down some steps into a low book-lined corridor and then around a corner and up some more steps and into a low-ceilinged dark room with blue felt wall, lit by tall candelabras of white candlesticks. Statues re-enacted rapes in each corner. The table laid out perfectly with shining silverware and crystal. Everyone found their places via small name cards in perfect italic handwriting and, as if on a signal, all sat down at the same time. Like I had joined a well-rehearsed dance troop.

‘That’s Alan Parlon, one of our more important cousins from over the pond, if you follow me,’ Arrow said, quietly in my ear as he sat me to his right. His voice also dropped in tone to a deep rasp. The man had a pair of thick eyeglasses the shape of 1950s televisions and a thinning hairline which he covered with an inadequate fringe of dyed black hair. He was thin in a way you’d describe as bony rather than slim: skinny, scrawny, unhealthily hollowed out, carved from fishbones and splinters and bound by wiry thread. ‘You’ll excuse me, but I’m deaf in this ear so I’ll have to have you over here beside me if I am to hear anything you say. Maybe that puts you at a disadvantage, ha, ha! This is Audrey, she’s a countess but we can forego titles this evening with your permission darling.’

She was a beautiful woman with bulging thyroidal eyes, which seemed to always ask something of you and reminded me of something which it took me half the meal to remember. Audrey’s hair was prematurely white as if induced by a trauma.

‘Dr. Massimo Volpe and his wife Dr. Henrietta Sarsfield. He’s a psychiatrist; she’s a paediatrician.’ A couple who looked nursey rhyme unmatched: she was the size of three people and he was a thin as a finger. ‘Henrietta does a lot of important work in Thailand with children, which is convenient because Massimo enjoys spending time in Thailand also, though not for professional purposes.’

‘Valerio Duse.’ Small man with rimless glasses and hair that reminded me of someone from the SS in a British wartime sitcom. ‘He works in motion pictures would you believe. A big shot. This is Jennifer, my niece, and Hector, her fiancé.’

She was beautiful– as far as I’ve ever been a judge in such things – short blond hair and bright blue eyes, her lips red with freshly applied lipstick and he was a large man with a thatch of thatch-coloured hair and an electric blue dinner jacket which was impossible to forget and difficult to forgive.

The conversation settled around us as the girls with their skirts and blouses brought in small toasted bread with different toppings as the antipasto. Chatter broke out and I listened in on the other guests as I considered my strategy. ‘I hear a lot of good things about you, Sam. May I call you Sam? Good. I read the report you wrote … how many years ago? … Osama Bin Laden. First time I think I saw his name come up in print. The Saudis; the move towards what you called “spectacle terrorism”. What was the name of the American operative you were working with? The lobbyist who got murdered?’

‘Bart Kirkby.’

‘Burned him alive in his car is what I heard? It’s the Mafia all over again. These people are the same.’

‘Yes?’

‘You have to understand that terrorism is a psychosis,’ Arrow said. His voice hit a groove in a conversation he had had before. ‘Not an ideology. Two hundred years ago crazy people thought they were Napoleon Bonaparte or Jesus Christ. Nowadays, they think they’re Jihadists. In a few years more it’ll be something else. Violence dresses up in all manner of garb but when it comes down to it, most of the time, it is the god of violence manifesting itself with the imagination of Zeus. Now a swan, now a shower of golden rain. And so, it will go. Now a plane crashing into a skyscraper; now a man with a knife running through a crowded shopping centre.’

‘I timed it,’ Dr. Volpe said. ‘It took less than a week. Six days exactly.’

‘What dear?’ Dr. Henrietta said.

‘The first 9/11 joke I heard was six days after the event. It was in square, a boy was telling his mother. He had heard it at school. The horror and outrage cooled.’

‘I don’t think that’s very tasteful,’ winced Alan Parlon, like there was too much vinegar in the salad dressing.

‘I’m afraid it is just human nature,’ Arrow said. ‘A joke is an epitaph to a feeling.’

‘Very good quote. Who said that?’ Valerio Duse asked.

‘It was probably Nietzsche,’ said Dr. Henrietta. ‘It almost always is.’

‘So young man, you were the seer,’ Alan Parlon said, looking at me and prescribing circles in the air with his knife. ‘How did you manage that, may I ask?’

I shrugged. ‘It was just about collating the information, spotting patterns, having the right sources. Trusting the right sources. I was not the only one doing this.’

‘Famous British phlegm,’ said Arrow as they brought us a soup that looked like gazpacho but was actually asparagus. A swirl of cream was a spiral galaxy the promised heart disease.

‘Not quite the best time to bring up phlegm uncle.’

‘Sorry, Jennifer,’ Arrow laughed in a short terrier bark. ‘What an inappropriate expression and terrible timing! I do apologize.’

‘Seriously though, Mr. Coleridge,’ said Parlon. ‘It was very fine work. We read your report with great interest at Langley. You know the President read it.’

‘I heard,’ said Arrow as if he had written it and all compliments and praise needed to go through him.

I nodded and we thankfully spoke of other things as we ate black pasta and some kind of flat fish whose eyes dolefully watched me as I ate him. Prosecco was poured followed by a dry white wine which took all the water out of my mouth and left it as dusty as a cathedral. Although I didn’t feel like I could properly relax, I did feel that I somehow belonged around this table. I knew I was an aspirant, more than a member. But my very being there was qualification.

Before the dessert we adjourned to the ‘Altana’, a wooden platform on the roof of the palazzo that looked down on Venice. We could see the rooftops sloping off to the distance. A nearby Piazza – although I have since been told there’s only one true Piazza in Venice (San Marco) and the other squares go by the name of ‘campo’ or field – was full of life. A street vendor threw something high into the air and it twirled down shining fluorescent lights as it slowly descended. People were eating in the outdoor restaurants. Some children were kicking a ball. There was a clamour of voices.

‘You know you are a lucky boy,’ Jennifer was at my side. She was shorter than me and looked up. There was a mischief in her eyes. [I suddenly remembered where I had seen Dr. Henrietta’s bulging slightly thyroidal stare. In the eyes of a woman I had strangled to death. My heart leapt a little.]

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Am I?’

‘Not many people get invited to one of Tom’s soirees and certainly not junior clerks from CGHQ. Yes, I’ve read your file as well.’

‘Midlevel.’

‘Junior.’

‘I don’t suppose you’d believe me if I told you those files were written to provide people like me with cover.’

‘Nice try,’ she laughed. ‘Not the files Uncle Tom gets.’

‘Well, I…’

‘And Ollie says you like the Jews.’

‘That’s not exactly how I phrased it.’

‘He tells me you love them.’

‘And you’re getting married…’ I gestured to the straw fellow who was doing some sort of stretching exercise, holding his foot in his hand and balancing ‘… to that?’

‘I need to borrow Sam for a moment, Jennifer,’ Arrow said as he drew me away. Jennifer winked. She had an easy confidence and I couldn’t help but wonder how easy?

There was a mariner’s telescope attached to a tripod at the corner of the Altana and Arrow put his arm around my shoulder and pulled me towards it.

‘Have a look through here,’ he said. ‘Now go across to the Campo, the restaurant Ai Ferri, do you see it?’

I nodded. The magnification on the telescope was impressive.  It had crosshairs. I followed his instructions.

‘Two rows down three tables across, a man is dining alone. He has a light blue shirt and what can only be described as (God help me!) salmon-coloured trousers. See him?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Now, let me precis this with a quick and timesaving piece of exposition,’ his voice very quiet in my ear. ‘I know you Sam. I know you through and through. I know that you are not only a successful agent, but a highly functioning sociopath, if not psychopath. I know this because we run courses and evaluations throughout your service with us which are designed to pick out with uncanny accuracy exactly the attributes that you have exhibited, despite your best efforts to pass as a human being. No, no. Calmly. Gently. No need. No need. Stay where you are, Samuel. Hold the telescope steady. Focus on the man again. You see him. Will you allow me to continue? Just give me a nod. No drama.’

I controlled my breathing and gave a little nod. I maintained my crouch. The man was eating a scoop of green ice cream with a long spoon that flashed underneath the lights of the restaurant. Pistachio presumably.

‘Good boy,’ he patted my arm. ‘Now I’ve looked at you very carefully and as well as your psychopathy, I also have taken note of your great control. Your discipline. Unsolved murders around your postings, there have been few. Mr. Kirkby stands out as an obvious exception. In fact, that was one of the red flags that first brought you to our attention. The child in Tokyo and the prostitute in Johannesburg both look likely as well.’

‘I…’ I was glad of the interruption because I had no idea what I was going to say.

‘These are not accusations. They require no defence. In fact, it would be wise of you to listen very carefully at this point and make no attempt to talk. Your country needs killers. People who have no qualms, no mercy, no shred of humanity. No fear. Psychopaths in a word. But we also need highly organised killers, disciplined. Not crazies. Not someone who is going to be found in some hotel room eating their own recently soiled underwear. I don’t want a werewolf, you see, I need a vampire. Someone with control and elegance and determination. People who can be controlled. People who follow orders. In return for immunity and protection. Now if I am wrong, which I may be, we will now go down and you will join us for dessert and the evening can still end profitably for you. I believe Alan would like you to take on a highly paid consultancy role at the CIA, money which of course would be paid directly into your quite prodigious Swiss account which Ollie has told me is bulging. Well done on that by the way. Money is a beautiful and righteous thing. But if I am right, you will excuse yourself to use the bathroom, you will make your way into the alleyway, via the garden, you will proceed to the square where the man is eating ice-cream, you will kill the man in the atrocious trousers and you will return in time for coffee and cognac and an optional cigar.’

I looked at Mr. Arrow. He smiled delicately and his eyes, as ever, seemed on the verge of tears. They twinkled like kindness. I looked back through the eyepiece at the target.

‘His name is Luigi,’ he said, very quietly. ‘Be quick, be discreet and be back here in ten minutes.’

‘Where are you going?’ Jennifer asked as we wandered back to the dining room and I took a step towards one of the teenaged girls with the long skirts.

‘Bathroom?’ I said to both her and the girl, who waved me to follow.

I went down an extremely steep and dark staircase with portraits of angry women on the walls and into the back garden where the man with the green cardigan was waiting, smoking the second half of a cigarette. I hung my jacket on a rake that was standing aslant the wall by a wheelbarrow and rolled my sleeves up as he unlocked a tall back gate and waved me through.

‘Come back this way,’ he said. ‘I’ll leave it open.’

I nodded.

After the food and the wine, it felt good to be out and moving in the cool evening air. There was a chill hint of winter on the way and moving felt delicious as I went down the narrow, deserted alleyway and through a couple of twists and turns until I found myself in the well-lit and noisy square. A kid chased a football. Gypsies were selling flowers and street vendors threw brightly coloured balls high into the hair and then caught them expertly. Instinctively I looked back at the Altana, half expecting to see a lone figure at the telescope but as far as I could tell from this distance no one was up there.

I made my way directly across the square to the restaurant where Luigi was having the last spoon of his ice cream. It had gone but he was trying to scrape the last drips from the bottom of the bowl. A greedy man. Luigi had small curly black hairs on the backs of his hands and up his arms like an unimaginative child’s scribble of what hair looks like. The hair on his head was a tight black weave and his eyes were slits behind scrunched up skin. He wiped his fingers and then his puckered mouth on the cloth napkin and screwed it up with an air of finality as he rose stretching and turned to enter the restaurant. My bet was that he was going to the bathroom. I slowed my approach to the restaurant, standing by the lamplit menu that was on a stand and the waiter approached asking me in English if I wanted to sit and recommending the pizza. I nodded and smiled blandly and allowed him to seat me and hand me a menu, then I asked for the bathroom in French.

He pointed to the back of the restaurant, slipping easily into French: ‘a gauche’. 

I took another look at the menu and ordered a pizza margherita and a beer. I walked through the restaurant. There was a tray near the door with the silverware in separate plastic buckets. I palmed a serrated steak knife without breaking stride and continued to the back and a gauche. The bathroom was a sink with a plastic bin beneath it to catch the drips and a nylon concertina door that you find in caravans with the symbol for ladies and gents affixed at a slight angle. I could hear a strident flow of urine, followed by a couple of sprinkly shakes.

Then the latch was clicked and, as the door folded open, I thrust myself through the opening and into the cubicle. Luigi tripped as his legs hit the rim of the toilet bowl and he began to lose his balance and fall backwards but there was really nowhere for him to do, as he slammed at an awkward angle against the wall. I grabbed both his hands and pulled them back over his head and then stabbed from below and up – there was no room for a downward stabbing motion – and under his armpit and into where I hoped his heart would be.

Three quick stabs as I let go of his hands and clamped my hand around his mouth, but he had let out nothing more than a gasp so far. He was in shock already and as his heart was compromised to the point of wreckage, his teeth gnawed at my hand, his eyes rolled in his head and he went limp, falling into an untidy heap, half across the toilet, his feet kicking up a little. I folded his body, checked his pulse, avoiding the blood that was seeping from his wound and turning his blue shirt a dark sopping red. His salmon trousers were, for the moment, unharmed.

I pulled the knife out and wiped the blade with a strip of toilet paper and then put it into my pocket. I closed the door as well as I could and washed my hands careful afterwards to remove my prints with paper towels, which I stowed in my pockets.

I walked straight out of the restaurant and dodged passed my waiter and into the square. I knew where I was supposed to be going but first, I took a detour to a nearby canal where I dropped the knife into the water when no one was close by. It took me another moment to orientate myself before I realised, I was standing in front of Ca’ Bembo, at which point it was relatively easy to find the side alley which had the door. I collected my jacket and put it on. The man in the cardigan closed and locked the door behind me. Then I made my way back up the stairs to the dining room.

‘I hope it wasn’t the asparagus soup,’ Jennifer said, causing a moue of disapproval from her fiancé.

‘Please!’

‘Sorry,’ I said, and accepted a small bowl of ice cream from one of the girls. It was green. Pistachio.